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Yeah, crazy to think that Google of all companies would track people in unexpected ways :eyeroll:. Your post is evidence that the scrutiny Google gets is actua
by rurp 2y ago
Yeah, crazy to think that Google of all companies would track people in unexpected ways :eyeroll:.
Your post is evidence that the scrutiny Google gets is actually helping matters. Companies, especially powerful ones, should default to not tracking personal data any more than necessary. I'm glad to hear that at least one department took that seriously.
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago[flagged]
- ayewo 2y ago> People's imaginations run far ahead of reality. Can you really blame people for that when the company in question has been enmeshed in a case like this [1] involving Chrome. 1: https://www.reuters.com/legal/google-settles-5-billion-consumer-privacy-lawsuit-2023-12-28/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/google-settles-5-billion-consu...
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago[flagged]
- kelnos 2y agoI'm not sure you're going to convince us that "Google is mismanaged" is an excuse for doing bad things.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoIt's not an excuse, it's still bad. But it's better than the alternative where it's a bunch of people trying to do the wrong thing.
- account42 2y agoAh yes, the good old "Sorry we accidentally violated your privacy and illegally disadvantaged competitors using our monopoly. But everyone is actually just doing the best they can, honest mistake. Teehee." Sorry but at some point people will stop buying that shit and Google is well past it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoThey should fix the situation. They try to do too many things at once. But it's hard to give engineers leeway to just work on things and at the same time make sure the combination of data collected can't be added in a way that is "bad" on some dimension. If you think about the combination of hundreds of groups doing things... it's just a hard problem. If you imagine running just maps and email and youtube, and you try to improve those products by instrumenting them in a pretty vanilla way... you just end up with a lot of data on people. Consider person X watches videos about lung cancer treatment options. Person X also drives from location a to b with some frequency. Location a is a residential address and location b is a hospital. You track both these things so you can recommend videos they might like amongst the bajillion videos available, and so they can get in their car and immediately choose location b without having to enter the address.Person X has their name in their email account so it displays their name when they send an email. Person X's name is John Smith. Put it all together - John Smith, who lives at 12 Main Street, Chicago, has lung cancer. And when he stops driving that route and stops looking at cancer videos but is still active... he's been cured.
- gavindean90 2y agoTracking is very rarely useful to the application but can be useful to the company when the application isn’t profitable on its own. Google has demonstrated this before.
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago[flagged]
- joshuamorton 2y agoThis is almost precisely backwards. Developers want so much telemetry for their applications, almost all of which is totally useless outside of the need to debug or improve that application.
- account42 2y agoExactly. In a world with sufficient anti-trust and privacy enforcement Google would instill into their employees a fear of even thinking about pulling stunts like this. Instead we have Googlers and ex-Googlers running defence for it claiming they see nothing wrong.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoIn such world, no one does anything without running it by the lawyers first, and then a months long debate occurs around every single little move, and nothing gets done.